Philipp Hoschka revealed a decision by W3C that XLink and XML Schema should not exit Candidate Recommendation status until a solution is found which allows generic link recognition of XHTML and SMIL Links; Tim Berners-Lee has proposed that XML Schema can be the needed glue between these specifications.

In an email sent to W3C mailing lists, Philipp Hoschka reminded that "the XLink Candidate Recommendation does not allow programs to recognize linking markup used in XHTML and SMIL (e.g. <img src="foo.gif" />) as generic links" and revealed the a meeting as been held on this issue "between Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly (representing XML Schema), Philipp Hoschka (representing SMIL) and Daniel Veillard (representing XLink)".

A XML Schema based solution, described on a W3C private page, is under development and a consensus has been reached that:

Xlink and XML Schema should not exit CR unless there is a solution to generic link recognition that allows XHTML and SMIL to continue to use their current linking markup. In particular, it must be demonstrated that a program can use this solution to detect the linking semantics of XHTML and SMIL linking attributes.

In a post on the xmlschema-dev@w3.org mailing list, Tim Berners-Lee extended the scope to SVG and urged XML Schema developers to provide concrete evidences of such a solution:

Without this code, it is difficult to say that the problem has been realistically solved.